Rocket Science

So I'm rewriting 'In the Dark,' which is science fiction. This compels me to dust off my interest in all things sciencey. A while back I heard about this weird new form of propulsion that someone is experimenting with. It seems that a LOT of a rocket's power is used to get up off the ground and into space. Those bloody huge tanks that were attached to the space shuttle? They were dropped off after it got into orbit, because their job was done. So someone a lot smarter than me got the bright idea to leave all of that stuff on the ground, and just use the power itself to get the spaceship up where it belongs. They fire a laser at the bottom of the craft, which is shaped like a parabolic dish, and that burns the air inside the dish into plasma. If I'm interpreting the information correctly, they use a pulsed laser, getting individual mini-explosions that 'pop' the craft up like a machine gun. Take a look at them here: http://www.lightcrafttechnologies.com/

I found a video of one of their tests, and damn that thing took off. They were using a test craft about the size of a cantaloupe, and it shot into the air like so many of the experiments that I've seen on Mythbusters. Then I started to imagine what something ten times as powerful could do with a ship that was already in space, away from things like gravity and atmosphere. I didn't know what I might do with that thought, but later on I got this idea about a guy who is a cop in another solar system. Bingo.

I got 'Waste Not' sent out for a vengeance-themed anthology, and submitted 'Trolls' for another one about rediscovering fantasy. I'm also still looking for someplace to send my newer, leaner version of 'Roaming.'

By the way, if you ever hope to have another productive moment in your life, do not take a look at the Internet Anagram Server. (http://wordsmith.org/anagram/) It lets you punch in a word or string of words, and it spits out every single possible combination of the letters that could possibly exist. Before I ran away screaming, I tried it with my own name, and one of the results was, 'He pens Pepto.' Not sure if that will enhance my writer's mystique or not.

Still writing.

Why 'The Haunting' isn't scary

As I'm making the notes for this, I'm watching the 1999 remake of 'The Haunting.' The old version is one of my favorite films, and it never fails to deliver a large helping of cold chills. When I first saw the teaser trailer for this new one, which gave absolutely no real hint about the film, I held my breath. In a little, secret room in my head, I whispered, 'Please don't suck. Please don't suck.'

I re-watch this newer version every once in a while, probably more often than I watch the original. I look forward to watching it, but I usually end up doing something else (like writing this) at the same time. Part of the reason the film gets under my skin the way it does, is because it doesn't suck. It misses. It aims in the right direction, and then for some god-damn reason decides to fire ninety degrees off target.

If you haven't seen the original or read the novel by Shirley Jackson, go do that. You won't forgive yourself if you don't, and I won't forgive you either.

Done? So nothing that I say is going to be a spoiler? Good.

There's this house, and it's haunted. There are ghosts, and that's where the problems with this incarnation of the story start. We see the ghosts. They're right there. The first ghost we see is a cute child, and it's more touching than scary. The character who sees it isn't scared at all, and neither are we. Before that, we see our first blatant clue that spooks are here. A tightening screw pulls a wire in a harpsichord tight enough to snap, and it happens right in front of us.

In the behind the scenes feature, someone, (one of the producers, I think) invokes a key truth about horror movies: Less is more. We need room in between the bits we see on screen for our imagination to flow into, so we can let ourselves be scared. But in this movie, we don't get less. We get more and more and more. On top of that, what we get isn't scary. The effects are magical instead of horrifying. We have majestic stone gryphons, magic carpets, and a villain who we see in both his painting and his ghost as a massive, towering giant. These are the currency of myths, not hauntings. After watching it again this time, it hit me what the CGI effects remind me of – The Harry Potter movies. If someone took a print of this films, changed the title to 'The Knights of Hill House,' and edited the dialogue at the beginning to take out the horror element, you would end up with a movie that was a lot more consistent.

So how would we go the other way? If we popped back in time, locked the director in a closet, then called all the actors and crew over to announce we were making a few changes, how would we make 'The Haunting' a genuinely ghostly movie? Well, as long as I'm armchair-quarterbacking, I'd draw most of my inspiration from (surprise) the book and the original film, which wisely deviated very little from Ms. Jackson's story. There would be a bit more emphasis on the house itself, as opposed to a single all-powerful ghost. We would see a few more of Hill House's previous owners come to disturbing ends. We could still let our actors display bits of heroism, because that's part of how we come to like them. But it wouldn't be game-changing heroism. One of the themes of good horror is how little our strengths and abilities do against the unseen forces that haunt us.

Hopefully I'll get my chance to play out on the field soon, instead of just second guessing the people already out there. I have an idea for a haunted house story that I started some time back. Sadly, I think I've lost what I had earlier written.

So I'll write it again.

When is a dump not a dump?

So just what have I been doing? As far as writing goes, not a whole hell of a lot. A couple of years ago I joined the safety committee at my day job, and recently the guy in charge was shuffled to another division. So now I'm trying to tell my peers to stop and look around a corner before they come tearing around it, driving either an order picker or a forklift and hauling either a thousand pounds of wire or a pallet of light bulbs. Doing that is easy. Doing it and not sounding like an asshole is a little more difficult.

I had lunch with a friend today while my wife enjoyed some silence, and while enjoying some quality enchiladas, my friend and I had a conversation about Bob from the Dresden Files, and Michael Crichten's books. This leads me to ponder something relevant to rewriting In The Dark: How do you dump a whole lot of information onto your reader and avoid losing them?

While my platoon sat on a ship for over nine months and waited to find out whether or not we were going to be sent in to multiple layers of mines, barbed wire, and people who really wanted to kill us, we played cards, watched movies on a TV that we bought ourselves, and did whatever we could to pass the time. I don't remember where I got it, but one of the books I devoured during that period was The Andromeda Strain. I had fallen in love with the original movie when I was a kid, and thought it would be a fun read. This was back during the period of my life when, while I was definitely aware that sometimes things were changed between the book and making a movie, I didn't really understand why, and wouldn't have sympathized if someone explained it to me.

Early in chapter one I realized that this wasn't exactly the story I already knew, and in that same chapter I began my education in viruses, bacteria, and all other kinds of bugs that can do nasty things to the human body. It kept my interest, because I like that kind of stuff, but it definitely broke the spell of storytelling. You do that, you're in trouble. Part of the reason Jim Butcher's Dresden books work, is because Bob is part of the story, and not just a 'talking head.' We learn the nuts and bolts of magic while the plot advances, and we never really notice that new data has been downloaded into our heads. The movie version of Andromeda Strain had to do a bit of info-dumping, and they got away with it by using shorter scenes where Person A, who knows something, has to explain it to person B so that B can go do their job. Plot advances, mission accomplished.

In the Dark is going to be science fiction. That's going to be pretty obvious from the beginning. But that still leaves me needing to say, 'Okay, people here are basically the same as you and me, with these exceptions. If you're comfortable with these specific new technologies, you'll have no problems in this world. There are no telepaths, no little green men, and no lightsabers.' I've got a bit of an advantage in that it's as close to hard science as I can make it and still have the story. I can define by exception from the real world rather than build a new world from scratch. There are a few differences, but those differences are important.

So that's what's spinning around in the background of my head while I'm trying to convince my supervisor that having everyone know ahead of time that he's going to get on the PA system and just say 'Fire drill,' is not a real fire drill. I'm sure whatever problems I encounter will end up in the book.

By the way, because I promised my wife I would post it: On Friday I came home from work, and right after I put my stuff down I went to give her a hug. When my hand went around her, it found something sharp on her back. As I pulled it up to look at what was lightly stuck in my palm, she says, 'Oh there's where that needle and thread went.' Perils of being married to a costumer. I got her back, though. When I had a reheated Monte Cristo sandwich for dinner, and she expressed her disdain for my sandwich, I thrust it at her, proclaiming, 'The power of Cristo compels you!' Getting 'that look' from her is one of the great joys in my life.

Still writing.

Criticism

I got a rejection Saturday. Not something new, but this one was a personalized response, which are pretty rare even in these days of e-subs and e-replys. The editor enjoyed the suspense and mystery of it (The story I sent in was 'Roaming'), but felt that the writing itself needed some tightening. I've been pretty much pounding back and forth on 'In the Dark' and 'The Red Man Burning,' so I haven't even scribbled on a short for a while. But I pulled up the version that I sent in and took a look at it.

I have a quiet reaction to criticism. On one hand, this is an opinion from one of my primary targets, but on the other, if I didn't think the damn thing was perfect I wouldn't have sent it in. I write for the reader, but it's the editor who makes the decision to toss money at me, or not. When you go looking for advice on writing, you find there's an endless supply of it. But one bit that I found by Marion Zimmer Bradley more or less smacked me in the head when I read it. As it settled in to become a permanent note in my mental book, it also reduced my sense of humor about this business by just another fraction. Without quoting too much of it, because that's called violating a copyright, the sentence that was printed in big, bold script said basically this: Editors don't buy good stories, they buy stories that they think their readers will pay to read.

Take as long as you need for that to settle in. It's still settling in for me, and I read it months ago. That doesn't just add another hoop for you to jump through in order to get your work on someone else's paper. That means you need to churn out a finished product that will please one person, and then go on to please the final audience. You need to please the readers themselves because they are the ones who will end up spending money on your piece in the magazine, and who will later see your name and buy the next magazine, or your book. But they will never see your story unless you first defeat the editor. In a perfect world, the editor has the exact same taste as the readers. Guess which world we live in.

Here's the article, and I owe a debt to Ms. Bradley for it.

http://www.mzbworks.com/why.htm

When I re-read 'Roaming' I did see some places where the editor may have been on the money. He said that the writing itself needed to be tightened up, so I'm going through and cleaning out anything that might be ambiguous, or repetitious.

So I'll rewrite it, and send it in again.

Where the vampires come from, part two

  Okay, this is part two of a post that I started last week. We're connecting whatever dots we can find to figure out a way (not THE way) that people might have come up with the vampire myth. If you're just joining us, go back one entry. We'll wait for you.

So that person lying there in the dark is going to be thinking in terms of what they already know. Maybe I'm cynical, but I do think a lot of us look down on the folks who lived back then, judging them to be ignorant and superstitious. After all, they didn't know about germs, or electricity, and most of them couldn't read. How smart could they have been? Well, smart enough to grow their own food, know how to deliver their own children, and the poorer ones even had to build their own homes. Could you do that? For that matter, can you say that you would know about bacteria and viruses if multiple people hadn't told you about them? Have you ever seen either? (Here's a hint. You can't see viruses, not even with a microscope. They're too small)

So that's you and me lying there in the dark, feeling the cold night air where ever it gets in through the covers. We're hoping that Aunty Em won't die, but we're hoping even harder that whatever is slowly killing her won't come after us. Then we hear something. Sure, it's probably just the house settling, like it has a thousand times before. But now we're afraid, and we've had lots of time to wonder just what is making Aunty Em sick. Is it an animal? A man? Something that only looks like a man?

We might also think about Aunt Bea, who died not too long ago. She and Aunty Em were so close. Remember that one of the original legends about vampires was that they were people who came back from the dead and preyed on members of their former families. But how is it getting to Aunty Em? Everyone keeps an eye on her during the day, so it must be something that comes out at night, when everyone is asleep. Her door is kept closed, and the front door is kept closed and bolted. Can it become a mist, and just seep in through the gaps in the windowpane? Can it change its shape and so that it's narrow enough to slide between the door and the jamb? It has to be able to do something, right?

But just what is it doing? How is it weakening her? Our family member has probably seen people die from blood loss before, either in an accident or by violence (remember the time period that we're dealing with). Some of the similarities would probably stand out: turning pale, sluggishness, delirium, falling unconscious, then dying. Is that what's happening to Aunty Em, they might wonder? But if whatever is attacking her is bleeding her, where does the blood go? What is it doing, swallowing it?

Now here I'm going to take a bit of a jump. Because I work with fiction, I'm allowed to take reasonable jumps, especially if they get me someplace interesting.

A while back I picked up the King James version of the bible, determined to go through it from Genesis to Revelation. While I was trying to get through the old testament, one thing stuck out. Blood is important. I don't mean blood in terms of being related, I mean blood that is spilled. When the details and the procedures for the sacrifices are lain out, we see over and over that the blood belongs to God. The people might get some of the meat, and the priests usually got their cut, but the blood was sprinkled on the horns of the altar. The symbolism of the blood of Christ is important, but it's human blood we're thinking about. How many makes and remakes of 'Dracula' have used the 'blood is the life' line? That goes back to Leviticus 17:11.

So if the thought of blood-stealing occurs to us while we're lying alone in the dark (and we are alone. Even if someone is sharing the room or the bed, they're probably asleep or too afraid of what's happening to talk about it. If you can't talk about what's scaring you, you're alone), that's going to scare us even more, isn't it? This thing, whatever it is, isn't just killing us. It's tampering with something sacred, something that may as well have 'Property of God' stamped on it. What happens to us if we let it take our blood? There's also a bit in the bible (Leviticus 19:28, among others) about mutilating ourselves, reminding us that we don't own this flesh and blood, we're just the caretakers. If we don't stop this intruder from stealing our blood, is God going to be upset, are we going to end up damned? End up becoming one of those things and coming back to the house to attack Uncle Owen? There's a dark sort of symmetry to that.

These are the kinds of thoughts that might occur to our family member if they have a sick relative. Now let's change it just a bit. Remember, these people live with all kinds of phenomenon that they have no understandable explanation for. Diseases, decay, and conditions like epilepsy. Again, where no one that we can trust provides an explanation, we make up our own. Some of the recorded explanations seem eerily similar to what we've been talking about here. Demons that posses people and make them fall on the ground, foaming at the mouth, or who sneak into your dreams night after night and distract you with naughty visions while stealing your other bodily fluids, and who even come in male and female varieties. We don't hear as much about incubi and succubi these days, partly because we've sort of blended them in with vampires due to their common characteristics, and partly because we've got a little more knowledge of human biology and psychology. The form is different, but the function is the same.

Like I said last week, just a train of thought. Follow it at your own peril.

I'm slowly slogging through the rewrite of In the Dark, as well as laying down the first chapter of Red Man Burning. The first chapter of the latter has our Protagonist as a young boy, and pulling up relevant chunks of my younger days feels odd, in a good but creepy at the same time way.

And I'm writing about it.

Genesis and evolution of the vampire, part one

Okay, this post is going to be in two parts. I came up with this last weekend, but the idea took a while to gel, and it ended up being pretty long. Some friends of mine got married last Sunday (congratulation Micky and Michelle!), and at the reception I overheard a brief bit of conversation, about vampires. Someone said that they had always understood that the vampire myth grew from the fear of death. Now that claim got a certain set of my brain cells humming, thinking that it wouldn't have been as simple as that. I didn't get into it at the reception, because when I get going on a subject that I like, I can go on and on for a while. That's good for a blog entry, but not so good for a gathering that's supposed to be for wishing the new couple a nice, happy life together. In addition, about half the people there did not seem like the sort that would enjoy a long, drawn out discussion about dying in a rather unpleasant way.

Now this is going to blend varying amounts of fact and speculation. It is not gospel, nor is it me saying 'this is the way it happened.' This might be the way it happened, or it might be similar to one of the ways it happened. Or it might just be me letting my brain go off on its own for a while. But it will at least try to follow a logical path, and by doing that we can learn something. Be warned, that path is going into some pretty dark territory.

Walk through this doorway with me. Careful where you step, because we're now back in medieval times. This is a typical city, and isn't the smell lovely? Yep, that's shit in the streets. Mainly human. Stay alert while you're walking around, because people dump their bedpans out of their windows. Also, try to not look weak. Even if this place has a city watch, they're not going to care what happens to a couple of strangers.

Let's choose a home at random. For our purposes, it could be a peasant's hut or a noble's manor, or anything in between. Here we go. We'll get to the rest of the family in a minute, but for now, look at this person. It's the middle of the day and they're in bed, and not because they felt like sleeping in. They're sick. They are a bit sicker today than they were yesterday, and tomorrow they'll be a bit sicker than they are today. I don't know if it's typhus, syphilis, tuberculosis, or one of those strange diseases that we're not familiar with in modern times. But no one thinks that this person is going to live through the month.

Now let's look at the rest of the family. All of them, the husband or wife, the children, and the uncles and aunts who live in this house, know the sick person well. They've worked with them, shared meals with them, and probably even had an occasion to sleep in the same room with them a few times. That person is part of their life, and everyday they see that person get weaker and weaker.

The kind of fear that type of environment produces settles into a person's head. It stays there, and it will pop up when things get quiet, like when a person is trying to get to sleep. Now imagine one of those family members, old or young, man or woman, lying there in the quiet, dark house. They can't stop thinking about Aunty Em (we'll borrow that name because it's convenient), about how pale she looks, and about how she sounds when she coughs. Given sanitary conditions and life expectancy in the period we're in, it's probably not the first person our sleepless subject has seen waste away, and it probably won't be the last.

One thing that people everywhere have in common, and I don't think we acquired it recently, is the need for answers. We have our inner view of the world, and when something unknown confronts us, we have a deep-seated need for who, what, when, where, how, and why. We need these labels so we can make this strange threat fit into our world. Ironically, all the reference points we use for the who, what, etc, are the cornerstones of our preexisting world. A traumatic event can expand people's worlds, but there's no guarantee that it will.

Take that setting, and think about it. I'll come back to it. Daylight savings time has struck, and I need to see if I can fall asleep without thinking about something horrible. But if I can't I'll at least have something to write about.

Life's little random bits

Okay, give me a second here. Because my wife and I are both exhausted at the end of a normal work day, laundry normally gets done on weekends. In this little chore, my beloved shamelessly exploits my machismo, and I end up being the one to load the washer and the dryer. Just now, as I was putting a load of colors in, the alarm on the car, about a foot away, goes off. I had the keychain and alarm remote in my pocket, and one of the keys probably hit the panic button. Our garage is not a large one, and so the sound bounced around and I jumped about three feet in the air. I'm still hearing the horn, somewhere in the background noise of my head.

Big deal? No. Just one of those odd moments that prove how chaotic the real world is. But think how something like that could be used in a story. While driving to lunch this afternoon, I saw a man riding his bicycle on the sidewalk. He was wearing a black suit, black sneakers, and a black straw cowboy hat. The black sunglasses added just the right touch. Now he could have been on his way home from church, on his way to church, or maybe he just didn't have a car to drive at that time and felt like dressing up anyway when he went out to lunch. Whatever the reason, I can say with 99% percent certainty that it's nothing alarming, and probably not even interesting.

But what could it have been, if we ignored the laws of probability? If we were characters in books we like to read or in movies that we like to watch, what might have happened? Would he have noticed us staring, cranked a bit on his handlebar brakes to slow down, and then turned around to come tap on the passenger-side window? Might we have seen him get a flat tire, and then come ask us for a ride because he's on his way to an exorcism, and can't be late? Maybe we would have forgotten about him completely, until we came home and saw him waiting on our front porch, smiling at us.

A little while back when I was explaining how that 'dumb' heroine might not be so dumb, I asked you to take note of all the little details of life around you that might mean something. Now think about all those odd, random moments you've had when life took a turn without signaling. Have you ever seen someone streak across the room while you and your friends were playing bingo? Encountered some idiot driving the wrong way on the street? Been talking to someone in a darkened room during the middle of the night, you turn around to see what they're suddenly looking at over your shoulder, and you see a single balloon drifting down the hall toward you?

Pick one of those moments, and pull it in the direction of your preferred genre. What's the story behind what you saw? If you're a romantic, is that person driving the wrong way trying to get to their true love's house before they go off with someone else? It's too easy to pigeonhole the streakers into comedy, so let's make them players in a drama about a bunch of guys on a Navy ship sitting around for weeks as they wait for the day when they go in the take the beaches of Kuwait. That's a teeny bit of humor in a long, slow story about young men wondering whether or not they're going to survive.

Get your mind used to doing that, to taking those odd moments, and even those normal moments, and then say 'What if -?” Congratulations. That's the first step to writing.

That's what I'm doing.